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  Tully shook his head wonderingly. “An old family friend?”

  “Not anymore.”

  Tully said, “What’s the matter? Did you forget where you lived? Couldn’t you have driven home, thanked him for a nice evening and gone inside?”

  “You don’t know Ben Hodes,” the girl said.

  “You tried awfully hard to introduce me,” Tully countered dryly. “What was I supposed to do—say hello and kick his head off?”

  “If you’d been a gentleman, you wouldn’t even have said hello.”

  Tully felt a thrust of irritation. “If you don’t like drunks don’t go out with them.”

  “That’s a large order in this town.”

  “Then you ought to organize a rescue unit and not depend on strangers.”

  “Especially timid ones.”

  “Right,” Tully said. “Who’s in charge here?”

  The girl laughed suddenly. “Put down that lorgnette, Duchess. Won’t I do?”

  “If you’re the recorder,” Tully said shortly.

  “I do his job when he isn’t here. What is it you want?”

  “I think Kevin and Jimmy Russel have some mining claims in this county. I’d like to know their location.”

  The girl’s slim face altered; a faint suspicion in it now. “Any special claims, or would just any of the Russel claims do?”

  “These are on Officer’s Ridge.”

  The girl’s eyebrows raised. “Now how did you know that? It’s called Vicksburg Hill now, and only the oldest-timers ever call it Officer’s Ridge.”

  “Why, Jimmy told me.”

  “Did he tell you to have a look at the claims there?”

  Plain annoyance mounted into Tully’s face. “He did, but I haven’t got an affidavit to prove it.”

  “Okay, Donald Duck. Sit down and pour yourself a glass of sherry while I hunt up the ledger.”

  She turned and walked into the big vault in the left wall of the room. Altogether she was a pleasant sight, standing, walking or scolding, Tully thought. He wondered who Ben Hodes was that she and presumably the rest of the town girls were so in awe of him.

  Presently she returned with the big ledger, dumped it on the desk and said, “Do you suppose I could ask you a question, a very small one, without having to watch you take your shirt off and fight?”

  “Go ahead,” Tully said coldly.

  “How do you propose to find these claims on Vicksburg?”

  “There are corners, aren’t there?”

  “Have you got a map, a compass, a surveyor and a logging crew in your pocket?”

  Tully frowned. “Why, are they hard to find?”

  “Unless you know the country, they’re impossible. There’s no road to them. There are some prospect holes on the claims, but you have to know even your game trails to find them.” She added with a faint trace of humor in her tone, “If you’re thinking of buying them, I can save you time.”

  Tully straightened up. “I’m not. Why? Aren’t they for sale?”

  “There have been offers—none of them accepted.”

  “Who offered?”

  “Ben Hodes for one. He runs the Mahaffey.”

  Tully said wearily, “There’s that man again.”

  The girl flushed, but said nothing. She started to open the claim ledger when Tully put his hand on the cover. “I guess I don’t need that. Can anybody around here take me to the claims?”

  The girl thought a moment, then asked, “Do you want to pay for a jeep?” At Tully’s nod of assent, she turned and crossed the room to the telephone and dialed a number.

  “Alec?” she asked. “This is Sarah Moffit. Are you working today?”

  Tully watched her with a close attention as she talked. He had had dealings enough with other county officials to know that they were a mine of miscellaneous information, the importance of which they seldom had an accurate knowledge. He would have liked to ask this Sarah Moffit more about the Vicksburg Claims, but he remembered the caution that mounted into her green eyes when he had first mentioned it.

  She turned and asked abruptly, “Can you be ready in half an hour?”

  “In ten minutes.”

  The girl relayed the message and hung up, then crossed back to the counter.

  “Your man will pick you up at the hotel in fifteen minutes. His name is Alec Bacchione and he’ll bring lunch.”

  “Sounds like a dude wrangler,” Tully observed.

  “Not quite,” the girl said patiently. “Alec was a combat engineer during the last war, and he’s sort of a freelance heavy-equipment operator. For a while he was chainman for the county surveyor, and he’s guided hunting parties, too. That’s why I picked him, because he knows that country like a book.” She added dryly, “You’ll be in safe hands. You’d better change out of those dancing pumps, too. You’re going to see some country.”

  Tully looked at her a long moment, then said, “Every time I have an impulse to be polite to you, you change my mind, so I better say thanks before you do it again.”

  “That’s all right. It was only a little trouble.” They regarded each other with a mild hostility before Tully turned and went out.

  As he changed into rough clothes and engineer boots in his room, his thoughts kept returning to the girl. She had a sort of cross-grained, almost malicious way about her that he did not wholly understand. His rudeness of last night she had returned to him compounded. Moreover, she met him with a mingled suspicion and dislike that he was not accustomed to. It was as if without voicing it she suspected his motives in looking over these claims. That’s small town, he thought, but I’ve got to be careful. Alec will tell her everything I say.

  A battered army surplus jeep was waiting in front of the hotel when he stepped out. The man behind the wheel was dressed in oft-washed coveralls and an ancient ski cap. He was a short, heavy young man with the dark perceptive eyes and the almost tender smile of an Italian. He introduced himself, shook hands with Tully, and gave him a few grudging seconds to throw his packsack on the back seat and settle himself before he shot the jeep into a U-turn and headed north out of town and up the valley.

  A .22 rifle lay between the separate front seats and Tully, pulling it away from the gear shifts, asked, “Is a gun standard equipment in these parts?”

  “If you live here,” Alec said laconically.

  “I don’t follow you.”

  Alec gave him a quick grin. “Ducks and blue grouse.”

  “Is the season open on them?”

  “Only if you live here,” Alec said again. Then he glanced obliquely at Tully and said, “These are our birds and our game in these mountains, no matter what the state says. We kill them whenever we want but never for fun. That’s more than these jokers from Kansas or Nebraska with their hunting licenses can say, isn’t it?”

  Tully grinned too. “Right you are,” and thought sourly, A character.

  Only a few minutes from town the main traveled road turned left up a gulch. A sign at the forks pointing left said “Mahaffey Mines, Inc.” Alec’s way was straight ahead and the road, an abandoned mine road, was already scarcely more than a track. It climbed into black spruce and twisted through alders fringing the creek which they were to ford twenty more times in the next two hours.

  Against the grinding of the gears and the noisy jolting of the jeep, conversation was impossible. Tully knew that Alec was wondering at the reasons for this trip and sooner or later he would have to be satisfied, but at the moment his silence was welcome and Tully reviewed the little he knew of the Russel Claims.

  Most of it had been gleaned in the long days and nights Jimmy and he had lain side by side on the schoolhouse floor. They’d been brought there after the crash of their Tigercat F7F on the rocky beach to the east.

  To dull their pain they talked, forgetting their dislike of each other. The one thing they had in common, an interest in mining, had never been a bond between them; Jimmy’s contempt for a “schoolbook miner” had seen to that. But dur
ing those interminable and miserable days Jimmy swallowed his prejudice, and he talked about little else but the Officer’s Ridge or Vicksburg Claims, ten in number, that were so rich in lead, zinc and silver. Every man had a dream in his heart, and these claims were Jimmy’s dream. Neither Jimmy nor his father could raise the money to develop them, Jimmy had told him. The R.F.C. Mining Loan Department had rejected their application for a government loan on the grounds that federal money was intended to enlarge going properties and not to develop prospects.

  As for raising outside money, it was the old story that Tully knew so well. There is nothing quite so articulate and hopelessly optimistic as a miner trying to share his deep conviction that there is great mineral wealth on claims he owns. The rest of the story was classic in its outline. Other mining interests knew the worth of the claims, but they also knew old Kevin’s inability to develop them. Insulting offers had been insultingly rejected.

  The substitute for a road which they had been traveling now hauled up abruptly at a caved-in cabin among the spruce. A tunnel mouth opened jaggedly into the slope behind the shack and Alec put the jeep across the rusting tram rails toward the other side of the clearing saying, “From here on we bushwhack.”

  The jeep climbed more steeply now and under Alec’s guiding hand it seemed to be almost sentient, picking its way around windfalls and choosing passages through the thinning timber that were just wide enough to accommodate it. A startled buck off to Tully’s right watched them in still amazement for long seconds, and then went vaulting off down the hill.

  They were presently in a thicket of young aspens and Alec hesitated just long enough to put the jeep into low low. Then he butted through the thicket, bending down the trees ahead of him and soon they broke out onto a high grassy bench interspersed with heavy thickets of black spruce which they traveled for another hour.

  Looking ahead, Tully had guessed that this bench would take them by gradual ascent to a higher craggy ridge looming directly ahead of them and nestled below the high peaks, but this was not to be. Only minutes later Alec swung the jeep in a half circle, cut the motor and said, “End of the line. It drops straight off past the edge of the timber.”

  They shrugged into their packsacks and Tully surprised Alec covertly watching him as he adjusted his straps.

  “There’s ten claims strung out in a line on top of that ridge,” Alec said, pointing. “Where do you want to head for?”

  “Claims three and four.”

  “Sarah tell you what’s on them?”

  Tully shook his head. “Jimmy did. That’s where the fault lies closest to the surface, isn’t it?”

  Alec nodded slowly. “So I heard, but I never heard him say it.”

  Something in his voice held Tully’s attention and they regarded each other almost with hostility.

  “He didn’t talk much about them?”

  “Not to me.”

  “You weren’t a POW with him,” Tully said quietly. “You talk about a lot of funny things when there’s not much else to talk about.”

  Alec said matter-of-factly, “Yes, I heard Jimmy’s pilot was in town. You going to mine this?”

  He heard it from the cook, of course, Tully thought with a feeling of self-derision. How could you keep any secret in a town the size of Azurite? Here was his chance to spike all the rumors for once and all. He laughed shortly, without humor. “Do I look like Daddy Warbucks? No, I’m a miner by trade. I’ve been in a hospital seventeen weeks. I came to see old Kevin and I thought I’d take a look at these claims Jimmy told me about. Just call it a day in the country if it’ll make you feel any better.”

  Alec blushed slightly and shrugged. “It’s okay by me. Why shouldn’t it be?” He hunched his packsack higher on his shoulders and set off toward the timber. Tully followed him down a steep game trail into a valley that seemed as deep as the Grand Canyon. They crossed a willow slough which left their legs covered with stinking mud up to the knees and then began their assault on Vicksburg Hill.

  It was a grueling climb that was a cross between straight mountain-climbing and a logging operation. Tully had never seen small timber so thick nor cliffs of rotten rocks so precipitous. Alec with his small hand axe hacked and chopped his way through the tangle. He held a pace that left Tully’s legs rubbery and his chest heaving for wind.

  Once atop the ridge, Tully threw himself on the ground utterly beat while Alec rolled a smoke and patiently regarded the country and, alternately, his companion. When Tully had recovered enough to sit up, he began to note the geology of the ridge. It was made up of decomposed granite and porphyry with occasional outcroppings of rotten quartz. When Alec saw him stirring again, he rose and wordlessly set off on a course due west through sparse, wind-twisted spruce. A five minutes’ walk along the far side of the ridge brought them to the Russel workings, and here Alec halted and said, “Here’s one. There’s another a half mile further on.”

  A discovery shaft, a tripod of timbers for a hoist above it, had been sunk into the rotten rock. But before descending, Tully first scouted the area and picked up signs of the fissure vein. Then halting, he shrugged off his packsack, opened it and brought out a prospector’s pick and miner’s lamp and then moved toward the shaft. A small dump of country rock, the useless non-ore-bearing rock, lay beyond it, separated from a dump of the true ore-bearing rock.

  “Want to go along?”

  Alec shook his head in negation. “My old man spent his life in one of them. I’m never going to spend an hour in one.”

  There was a persistent breeze from the west at this altitude that chilled Tully and made the shelter of the shaft welcome. The ladder was in good condition but he descended carefully, turning his lamp on the walls of the shaft. Three quarters of the way down, at fifteen feet, he picked up the first traces of the zinc and lead outcrop. Where the drill holes had scarred the rock surface, he saw the shiny jet crystals of galena-lead. As he descended, he saw the vein widening until, standing in the foot of icy water at the bottom of the shaft, the whole structure of the vein lay before him. Sulphides of silver and zinc in addition to the galena mottled the walls which were slate gray and appeared to be almost solid ore-bearing rock. Slow excitement welled up within him as he shone his lamp on walls and ceiling. Jimmy Russel, even in delirium, had not exaggerated the quantity exposed.

  Presently, he sloshed back ten feet into the tunnel. The tunnel ran for only a few feet before it ended. The showings all along the way were uniform and when he halted at the face of the drift which did not even expose the whole vein, it came to him with a stunning force that if Jimmy’s smelter report figures were right, old man Russel had a fortune in his hands—a fortune he was powerless to touch.

  The cold water had numbed his feet through his boots, but still Tully did not move. He was calculating the labor it had cost for the imperfect exploratory work Jimmy had accomplished. All the ore, after being blasted and hoisted out, had probably been sacked and packed by mule down to a shipping point for milling and smelting, a monumental task. Jimmy’s only reward had been a set of figures on a smelter report, but that had been reward enough, Tully knew. He turned now and retraced his steps, climbing the shaft ladder into the pushing wind of the sunny afternoon. He hoped, as he walked toward Alec, that the lingering excitement he still felt did not show in his face.

  Alec had chosen a seat behind a rock out of the wind and Tully slacked down behind him and they ate their lunch. Presently, Alec regarded his soggy boots and said, “At least you got the mud washed off. What was it like?”

  “It’s there. What it’ll run, I don’t know,” Tully said matter-of-factly. “What did old Kevin and Jimmy ever do with it?”

  “Just what you see. They packed samples down from here and from the other discovery shaft and that’s about all.”

  “Is it good enough to mine on this market?” Tully said.

  “The way I get it, to make a mine pay you’ve got to haul out ore; to haul out ore you got to have a road.” He glanced at Tu
lly and said dryly, “I understand roads don’t come cheap in this stuff.”

  Tully nodded. “A big outfit could swing it though.”

  “Old Kevin isn’t big. And again, the way I get it, the big outfits want all of it if they put in the road.”

  Tully scowled, “What about the county?”

  “What about it?”

  “I mean if the county takes a look at what Kevin’s got, they should build a road so he can open up his mine. The taxes they’d get from his operations would easily pay for the road.”

  “Ha!” Alec said bitterly. “Maybe some other county but not this one.”

  Tully looked at him inquiringly. Alec’s expression, now taciturn, seemed to indicate that he thought he had talked too much.

  But Tully persisted. “What’s the matter with this county? A friend of yours works for it.”

  Alec glanced quickly at him. “Sarah Moffit? Sure, she’s got to live, just like the rest of us.”

  “You mean if there were any other way to live she wouldn’t work for the county?”

  “Check.”

  “I get the feeling behind what you’re saying, but I don’t understand it,” Tully said. “The county won’t build Kevin a road. Right?”

  Alec nodded.

  “Why not?”

  “Well, who okays the roads? The commissioners, don’t they? You don’t have to go any further.”

  “What have the commissioners got against Kevin?”

  Alec smiled almost secretly. “He’s a miner and that’s enough.”

  Tully scowled. “Make it plainer.”

  “Well, during the depression this town practically folded up. It was the ranchers down the valley who paid all the taxes and who elected the county officials. The three commissioners are ranchers. If there is any dough for roads, they’re ranch roads, not mine roads.”

  Tully shook his head slowly. “That’s kind of tough on Kevin.”

  Alec shrugged. “They tell me that’s what the Germans found out under Hitler.”

  Tully was silent a long moment considering this information. It seemed unreasonable that three county commissioners would vote against something that would add enormously to the tax rolls, but there the facts were.